Only 3 weeks left until my exam. Now that Babel is up and running I have to start focusing on my presentation. What do I want to show? And how finished should the result be? Elbereth is still helping me with the scripting parts, but because I’m asking a lot he can’t give me a fixed estimate on how long it will take to complete some pieces of code. He wants to have a go at physBall first, to fix the long-distance communication. If that works he can use it for the Beacon game as well. After that things should go rather quickly. I’m not sure if it will be done before my exam though.
I do want to have some more playable content, a least for the exam exposition in September, because one basic game seems a little too little to make for a proper presentation. That’s why I want to revisit physBall and make the game a little
easier development-wise, while also working a bit on the context in which the game takes place. Because the first attempt didn’t get the response I hoped for I think people have to
be eased into the concept som more. That’s why I decided to create a smallerscale obstacle course. The principle of the game is still the same, but the environment in which it takes place is very obvious and the challenges are very direct.
The obstacles will be tile-based, so I can grow or shrink the entire track as desired. Coming up with a variation of obstacles is a challenge, but I’m sure that will work out. I don’t have 
much trouble with building objects in the Second Life editor. Instead of a money prize, the game will feature a grab bag to which people can make donations of virtual objects, preferably tools to play the game with. Winners of the game will get a chance to take a random onject from the grab bag. In this way I like to encourage the sharing of ideas and resources and more collaborative design.
